Guest Lectures

Each week in EL837 we have had someone from the industry to come in and speak with us about what they do. This post is a recap of who we had and my thoughts on there visit.

Week 5

This week we had Gary Chapman the director from Valiant and Brendan Houghton lead storyboard artist on Valiant as well as films such as sunshine and 28 days later.

Although I really didnt like the film it was interesting to speak to both of our guests for slightly different reasons. Gary was able to tell us about the difficulties assossiated with directing a major CG film, especially if its your directorial debut. He gave us a good overal impression of low budget british films and how directors assossiate with there animators.

Brendan was who I was really impressed with. Having worked on various films and worked all around the world it was really interesting to see his take on the industry and how things work within it. It was also really interesting to see how simple drawings can bring a whole sequence to life and how even the smallest use of perspective can make your drawing speak much louder. It was also interesting to see how much sway storyboarders can have in how a piece develops. As it is they who make the initial transition from mind to page, even if it is under the scrutiny of the director.

This week was fun and was our first interaction with people from the industry other than David, and hes yet to elaborate on his own experiences. Sadly we didnt get an animators point of view, but hopefully we'll see that soon.

Week 6:

This week a Phd student from Glasgow gave us a talk on his thesis project. Medical Visualising with a focus on the doctor patient relationship. It was interesting to see a different use of CG however it held no real interst for me. The only things I really took from this is using the animated sweep to create geometry, and that the film and games career ladders arent the only ones out there.

Week 7:

This week we had a visitor from MPC who has worked on films such as X:Men 3 and Sunshine. He was a tools developer. It was interesting to see the tools they were developing and the fact that they practically control there whole development pipeline from within the company. Seeing the procedures they use to create industry level CG tools really intrigued me.

However there was nothing really to take away from this as his line of work had practically nothing to do with animation in a direct sense. Nonetheless interesting to see some of the modern techniques in action and how they are developed.